Evolution of Mobile Payments
August 14, 2011 11:00 PM
Carrier Billing
Before the payments industry began testing phones at the point of sale, vendors of ringtones, wallpaper images and simple games were already selling their wares through handset software. The charges appear on carrier bills. (Image: ThinkStock)
Text-to-Pay
Few consumers used a smartphone before the 2007 launch of Apple's iPhone. In those days, companies like PayPal and Obopay built systems that worked with text messages. (Image: ThinkStock)
Mobile Apps
With the 2008 launch of the iPhone App Store, PayPal and others developed apps to allow access to payment systems originally developed for the Web. (Image: Bloomberg News)
Tags
Even today, few phones are built with wireless payment chips. Several companies instead enabled wireless payments at the point of sale with "tags" — stickers with the necessary technology built-in.
Say Cheese
Mobile capture technology allows people to deposit checks or pay bills by photographing them with a phone's camera. It is one of the few ways banks have differentiated mobile banking from online banking. (Image: ThinkStock)
Swipe that Stripe
Vendors such as Square, VeriFone and Intuit offer devices that let merchants accept mag-stripe cards from a phone. The payment is sent over the carrier's network.
Mobile Wallet
Google Wallet and similar projects promise to allow users to access a payment card from the phone and then use a built-in Near Field Communication chip to pay at the point of sale.
